Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight

Carmen and her mother are close. As far as Carmen’s concerned, she has nothing to hide from her mother so she’s happy to have her mom as her ‘friend’ on Facebook. Of course, Carmen’s mom doesn’t always understand the social protocols on Facebook and Carmen sometimes gets frustrated. She hates that her mom comments on nearly every post, because it “scares everyone away…Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post…It’s just uncool having your mom all over your wall. That’s just lame.” Still, she knows that her mom means well and she sometimes uses this pattern to her advantage. While Carmen welcomes her mother’s presence, she also knows her mother overreacts. In order to avoid a freak out, Carmen will avoid posting things that have a high likelihood of mother misinterpretation. This can make communication tricky at times and Carmen must work to write in ways that are interpreted differently by different people.

PS: I know, as Bruce pointed out it’s not “new”. Well, I am not on the “social side of security”, so for me it was a new reading. If you are not into “social security” too, I strongly recommend these 5 minutes of readings.

The idea of social steganography became so appealing to me that I decided to create my first Android app with the sole purpose of allowing users to add hidden secret messages to seemingly normal Facebook status updates. It's called Securebook: